The Twelve African Novels (A Collection). Edgar Wallace

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СКАЧАТЬ who will say that you never reached the Great Forest, and I shall have evidence to confound them.” Still the chief hesitated, and the waiting ranks listened, eagerly shuffling forward, till they ceased to bear any semblance to an ordered army, and were as a mob.

      “Lord,” said the chief, “we will go tomorrow—”

      The smile was still on Sanders’ lips, but his face was set, and his eyes held a steely glitter that the chief of the Akasava knew. “You go today, my man,” said Sanders, lowering his voice till he spoke in little more than a whisper, “else your warriors march under a new chief, and you swing on a tree.”

      “Lord, we go,” said the man huskily, “though we are bad marchers and our feet are very tender.”

      Sanders, remembering the weariness of the Akasava, found his face twitching. “With sore feet you may rest,” he said significantly, “with sore backs you can neither march nor rest — go!” At dawn the next morning the N’Gombi people came in twentyfive war canoes to join their Akasava friends, and found the village tenanted by women and old men, and Tigili, the king, in the shock of the discovery, surrendered quietly to the little party of Houssas on the beach.

      “What comes to me, lord?” asked Tigili, the king. Sanders whistled thoughtfully.

      “I have some instructions about you somewhere,” he said.

IX. The Wood of Devils

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      Four days out of M’Sakidanga, if native report be true, there is a trickling stream that meanders down from N’Gombi country. Native report says that this is navigable even in the dry season.

      The missionaries at Bonginda ridicule this report; and Arburt, the young chief of the station, with a gentle laugh in his blue eyes, listened one day to the report of Elebi about a fabulous land at the end of this river, and was kindly incredulous.

      “If it be that ivory is stored in this place,” he said in the vernacular, “or great wealth lies for the lifting, go to Sandi, for this ivory belongs to the Government. But do you, Elebi, fix your heart more upon God’s treasures in heaven, and your thoughts upon your unworthiness to merit a place in His kingdom, and let the ivory go.” Elebi was known to Sanders as a native evangelist of the tornado type, a thunderous, voluble sub-minister of the service; he had, in his ecstatic moments, made many converts. But there were days of reaction, when Elebi sulked in his mud hut, and reviewed Christianity calmly.

      It was a service, this new religion. You could not work yourself to a frenzy in it, and then have done with the thing for a week. You must needs go on, on, never tiring, never departing from the straight path, exercising irksome self-restraint, leaving undone that which you would rather do.

      “Religion is prison,” grumbled Elebi, after his interview, and shrugged his broad, black shoulders.

      In his hut he was in the habit of discarding his European coat for the loin cloth and the blanket, for Elebi was a savage — an imitative savage — but still barbarian.

      Once, preaching on the River of Devils, he had worked himself up to such a pitch of enthusiastic fervour that he had smitten a scoffer, breaking his arm, and an outraged Sanders had him arrested, whipped, and fined a thousand rods. Hereafter Elebi had figured in certain English missionary circles as a Christian martyr, for he had lied magnificently, and his punishment had been represented as a form of savage persecution.

      But the ivory lay buried three days’ march beyond the Secret River; thus Elebi brooded over the log that smouldered in his hut day and night. Three days beyond the river, branching off at a place where there were two graves, the country was reputably full of devils, and Elebi shuddered at the thought; but, being a missionary and a lay evangelist, and, moreover, the proud possessor of a copy of the Epistle to the Romans (laboriously rendered into the native tongue), he had little to fear. He had more to fear from a certain White Devil at a faraway headquarters, who might be expected to range the lands of the Secret River, when the rains had come and gone.

      It was supposed that Elebi had one wife, conforming to the custom of the white man, but the girl who came into the hut with a steaming bowl of fish in her hands was not the wife that the missionaries recognized as such.

      “Sikini,” he said, “I am going a journey by canoe.”

      “In the blessed service?” asked Sikini, who had come under the influence of the man in his more elated periods.

      “The crackling of a fire is like a woman’s tongue,” quoted Elebi; “and it is easier to keep the lid on a boiling pot than a secret in a woman’s heart.” Elebi had the river proverbs at his fingertips, and the girl laughed, for she was his favourite wife, and knew that in course of time the information would come to her.

      “Sikini,” said the man suddenly, “you know that I have kept you when the Blood Taker would have me put you away.” (Arburt had a microscope and spent his evenings searching the blood of his flock for signs of trynosomiasis.) “You know that for your sake I lied to him who is my father and my protector, saying, ‘There shall be but one wife in my house, and that Tombalo, the coast woman.’” The girl nodded, eyeing him stolidly.

      “Therefore I tell you that I am going beyond the Secret River, three days’ march, leaving the canoe at a place where there are two graves.”

      “What do you seek?” she asked.

      “There are many teeth in that country,” he said; “dead ivory that the people brought with them from a distant country, and have hidden, fearing one who is a Breaker of Stones. I shall come back rich, and buy many wives who shall wait upon you and serve you, and then I will no longer be Christian, but will worship the red fetish as my father did, and his father.” [Bula Matidi, i.e., “Stone Breaker,” is the native name for the Congo Government — EW]

      “Go,” she said, nodding thoughtfully.

      He told her many things that he had not revealed to Arburt — of how the ivory came, of the people who guarded it, of the means by which he intended to secure it.

      Next morning before the mission lo-koli sounded, he had slipped away in his canoe; and Arburt, when the news came to him, sighed and called him a disappointing beggar — for Arburt was human. Sanders, who was also human, sent swift messengers to arrest Elebi, for it is not a good thing that treasure-hunting natives should go wandering through a strange country, such excursions meaning war, and war meaning, to Sanders at any rate, solemn official correspondence, which his soul loathed.

      Who would follow the fortunes of Elebi must paddle in his wake as far as Okau, where the Barina meets the Lapoi, must take the left river path, past the silent pool of the White Devil, must follow the winding stream till the elephants’ playing ground be reached. Here the forest has been destroyed for the sport of the Great Ones; the shore is strewn with tree trunks, carelessly uprooted and as carelessly tossed aside by the gambolling mammoth. The ground is innocent of herbage or bush; it is a flat wallow of mud, with the marks of pads where the elephant has passed.

      Elebi drew his canoe up the bank, carefully lifted his cooking-pot, full of living fire, and emptied its contents, heaping thereon fresh twigs and scraps of dead wood.

      Then he made himself a feast, and went to sleep.

      A wandering СКАЧАТЬ